Get Up Offa That Brown (5.5%) – Big chocolate notes. Dry, not too sweet. Taking a sip of this and a sip of the Berliner Weiss gave me a cinnamon taste 🙂 Sometimes it’s fun to play beers off each other.

Lots of branded gear for sale.

Some breweries incorporate their spent grain into making bread. This place sends it off to be made into dog treats.

Golden Road were one of the first LA breweries to put their beer into cans.

I wanted to try this, but it was kinda hard to fit into our traveling schedule.

Fried Roman Artichokes served with garlic aioli and spicy marinara sauce. They use Point the Way IPA in the batter.

Pretzel Mac served in a pretzel bowl and topped with bacon, parmesan and chives.

The mac ‘n cheese was well-seasoned and very cheddary. So glad it wasn’t bland. If you’re gonna do mac ‘n cheese, better make it taste like cheese. The bun was a bit spongy/rubbery but ok to nibble on and to serve as the vehicle.

Carry On Citrus Ale (5.2%) – Brewed with lemon and orange. They must use the whole fruit cuz I got a lot of rind/zest. Pleasantly and mildly sweet on the front, with a long bitter finish, like marmalade (which I hate btw, but love the marmalade-like quality in this beer!). Wow. One of the best fruit beers I’ve ever tasted. They really embraced the bitter citrus, so it’s fruity but not overtly sweet. This particular balance meant I could drink this whole 16oz glass and didn’t feel sick or bored of it by the end. I couldn’t tell where the hops were among the fruity bitterness, so in that way it was a very intriguing and enjoyable beer for me.

Golden Road Brewing is my idea of a brewery that really knows what they’re doing. All the beers I tried were rock solid and great examples of their particular styles. The food was pub grub but done really well. Another winner!

Night + Market Song

Night + Market Song is a Thai place in Silverlake (aka hipsterville) that serves “Thai drinking food”.

You won’t find the typical rainbow curries here.

I believe this uhhh magazine spread was about this, where some ex-porn star cooked in the restaurant for a day. One of the more unusual pieces of food media I’ve ever seen on a restaurant wall…

I’ll try…

This is gonna be a tough review for me to write cuz of the way I was feeling emotionally that night. I was really not in a good place, and it goes to show how internal and external factors can affect the simple enjoyment of food. I’ll try to be fair but I also have to be honest.

Beer list was blah. With the variety of beers available in Los Angeles, there are way more exciting and adventurous yet still accessible beer options for pairing with spicy Thai food. I didn’t order anything to drink but in retrospect I should’ve at least got a Hoegaarden (Belgian Wit) to ease my mood.

This Catfish Tamale dish was highly recommended by one of my trusted Instagrammers, lee.f.man.

Smallish space, tables are small and a bit cramped, but it’s very colourful in here!

An order of Sticky Rice to be eaten with pretty much everything on the menu except the noodles. They recommend using your hands to take a bit of rice and using it to scoop food into your mouth. However, trying to clean sticky rice off your hands with a paper napkin doesn’t work well 🙁 so I resorted to spoon and fork.

My favourite dish of the night, Larb Lanna (Chiang Mai Style Larb), one of seven larb dishes on the menu. I’ve never seen such a variety of larb on a menu before…it was hard to choose, but we chose this one because it contained “dry spice mix hand-carried back from the motherland by Chef Kris”. I got a rich irony-ness from the pork liver and blood that is incorporated into the chopped pork meat. Raw cabbage, green beans and cucumber on the side.

The frying was done really well. Crispy on the outside but the meat was a touch dry. Would’ve been much better accompanied by a beer. As it stands, it’s just a slightly unexciting fried chicken dish.

The eggplant relish was scented with steamed and mashed waterbugs but I didn’t get any perfumey or truffley quality from it at all. Coupled with the dryness of the meat, this dish was a disappointment. They might enjoy chicken fried to this degree in Thailand but I didn’t like it.

Hor Ab (Catfish Tamale). Catfish and pork fat baked in banana leaves.

This was by far the spiciest dish we ordered. The chilies and herbs absolutely buried the catfish, but it wasn’t too thrilling to eat the chilies and herbs on their own. Wicca really enjoyed this dish though.

An order of Coconut Rice, which was also sticky, which was a surprise because we were expecting a bowl of typical loose rice.

The damage.

There was an issue inside of me emotionally that I couldn’t shake throughout the whole night and it prevented me from fully participating in this meal…almost like half of me wasn’t even there. My notes from this night totalled three measly lines whereas usually I write 1-2 pages. So sorry, I couldn’t give Night + Market Song my full attention because they’re really trying to do something different, possibly on the level of Andy Ricker and Pok Pok in Portland, but I just really couldn’t give a fair assessment. Hopefully there will be a next time.

One thought on “LA Day 3 – More Great Beer, and a Tough Night of Thai Food”

Leonie would approve of the day-drunkeness! I find it funny that you say a brewery is family friendly…

The mac and cheese looks really good! That dark orange colour from the cheese… you don’t see that often in mac and cheeses that try to cheat with more cheese sauce with flour as a thickener! I would love to try the artichokes one day…

I love that they recommended eating the sticky rice with your hands. Too bad about the paper napkins and messiness though. I have never heard of ‘larb’ before! Interesting… looks yummy as do those noodles! Looks like just the right thickness and texture 🙂

2 days agoby dennisthefoodieS H R I N K A G E // No shrinkage here with @backcountrybrewing 's impressive 3.4% #IndiaSessionAle#IWasInThePool ! You get most of the juicy goodness of a full-on #hazyipa but with half the alcohol! The finish is understandably lighter and waterier but for the style it's quite an accomplishment. #craftbeer#backcountrybrewing#yvr#vancouver // You might've noticed way less beer posts lately. I've stopped drinking alcohol on most weekdays, so cut down my consumption by half. Feels good but my beer fridge is bursting at the seams. Strictly cream of the crop from now on (hopefully).

2 days agoby dennisthefoodieC A U L I F L O W E R // Wicca whipped up a #ChickenCurry with #RoastedCauliflower for #dinner . The extra roasting step is so worth it! She also threw in mushrooms, sweet potato, tomatoes, and carrots. We've been using Megachef blue label fish sauce for cooking lately and it's great — a bit bolder and saltier than Red Boat. (We still love Red Boat for making nuoc cham though!) The Megachef has great depth, which you can tell by tasting side-by-side with cheap fish sauce, which tastes mostly like salt and stank. #curry#yvr#vancouver

2 days agoby dennisthefoodieS W E E T ' N S W E E T P O R K // Some good #Korean#SweetAndSourPork ($18) with crunchy rice flour batter at @andamiro_korean_bistro . Like Chinese S&S pork, this Korean version is still plenty sweet and good but you have to be in the mood. Swipe to see the royal flourish of omelette strips on their Royal Beef Japchae ($16) and decent Bulgogi Stew ($12). Good value and service at one of the few Korean restaurants in Vancouver proper. They gotta do something about the smell of gas though. It's not the mercaptan (rotten eggs)

2 days agoby dennisthefoodieC H E E S E ' N C H I C K E N // Some good/decent #Korean eats this past weekend with @michelle_wsy . (Great seeing you and the family! Thanks for the exclusive American Spam!) I finally got to try a Korean bbq dish with melty cheese in it: #ChickenBulgogi ($13) with #cheese (+$3). Amusing but not particularly delicious. Watery bland cheese hardens fast. The restaurant @andamiro_korean_bistro is in a convenient location (for us), has good value and prompt service, with decent food that does the job. Quick review of this place now posted on my blog. #andamiro

2 days agoby dennisthefoodieO U T O F S E A S O N // No kidding, #uni is totally out of season right now, but that didn't stop me from trying these dirt cheap big unis (3 for $10) from Steveston. After all the work of cutting these guys open and cleaning the #seaurchin gonads, the result tasted watery with none of the silky richness that uni has from October to March. Lesson learned! (Actually I already knew this going in, but I had to test the theory for myself .) #yvr#vancouver#sashimi